Alpha blending refers to a process of combining rasterized fragments with a background to create the appearance of partial transparency. Rendering semi-transparent surfaces correctly using an alpha blending equation typically requires sorting fragments from front-to-back or back-to-front.
In real-time applications, this is often performed by sorting primitives using a central processing unit or using depth peeling on a graphics processor. Such depth peeling requires a separate geometry pass for each transparency layer. Unfortunately, this can be quite resource intensive.
For applications that only need a transparency “look and feel,” techniques have been developed for approximating the result of correct depth-sorted alpha blending. One such approximation technique involves a sum of color that is weighted with an alpha value or transparency coefficient. While such techniques are less resource intensive, the resultant quality is less than desired.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.